The Nation at Play

A MOVEMENT LED by nationalist elites and princes, the early story of Indian Olympism is also the story of a global league of upper-class elites, connected through patronage networks in Europe, who passionately pushed the Olympic ideal. Until the 1920s, the Olympics were largely a Eurocentric enterprise, but India’s embrace of Olympism in the 1920s was also simultaneously accompanied by a powerful push for diffusing the Olympic ideal in Latin America and Southeast Asia. In all three cases, the same strategy was followed: the use of the global network of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the co-option of local elites with enough private resources and European contacts to liaise with the Olympic movement’s centre. In that sense, the origins of Olympic sport in India is a missing piece in the global story of Olympism. In a Europe divided by war, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) pushed this expansion as a strategy for survival and in India the ideal was appropriated by elite nationalists as a new avenue for self-respect, modernity and identity politics in the sporting arena. Olympism came to India as part of the processes of globalisation, decades before the term itself became fashionable. But once it was initiated, it was appropriated by and became inseparable from the forces of nationalism to begin with, and the centrifugal regional tendencies thereafter.

THE JOURNEY BEGINS: ANTWERP 1920

To Sir Dorab Tata goes the credit for starting systematic Olympic activity on Indian soil in 1920. Son of the pioneering nationalist steel baron Jamsetji Tata, Dorabji was intimately involved in fulfilling his father’s idea of creating an indigenous and modern steel industry in India. He is widely credited with the establishment of the Tata Steel Company in Jamsetpur (now Jamshedpur) that became India’s largest private enterprise of the time. Simultaneously, in the great tradition of Parsi philanthropists in colonial India, some of his most valuable contributions came as a benefactor for sport, culture and education. Before taking an interest in Olympism, Sir Dorabji had already played a key role in the establishment of school and college cricket in Mumbai in the 1880s. It was when he became president of the Deccan Gymkhana that he took an active interest in promoting the Games Ethic in the region.

For Sir Dorabji, sport became the playing field where tradition and modernity met, clashed, and fused. A good example is the Deccan Gymkhana. The committee which ran the Gymkhana was not conversant with the details of managing athletic meets along European lines and wanted to develop their sports programme more in line with established Indian traditions. Sir Dorabji, nominated president of the Gymkhana, played a central role in the fusion of foreign and indigenous cultures that ensued. At the first athletic meet the Gymkhana organised, Dorabji found that the competitors were “all boys of the peasant class working in the fields and living off poor fare…” Naturally, they had no idea of European rules or modern training of any kind. On attending a meeting of the Gymkhana, Dorabji found that they were proposing to run their 100-yard heats round a bend without strings. This was because their sports ground was very small and the track was part of a rough unrolled grass field. To the peas­ants, running was running, but now it had to be undertaken under standardised and controlled conditions. In Sir Dorabji’s letters on the subject, preserved at the International Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, the one thing that strikes the reader most palpably is his sense of wonder at this clash of peasant and Western cultures in the races at the Deccan Gymkhana. Other popular events included the long distance race of about 25 miles, rightly designated the Marathon. The peasants who participated were used to running barefoot on hard macadamised or dirt roads.

Despite the lack of training facilities at the time, Dorabji noticed to his astonishment that a few of the men who partici­pated in the contests organised ran the distance in fair time. He observed that their time “would compare well with the times done in Europe or elsewhere”. In 1919, some of their times were close to the times clocked at the Olympics. Suitably impressed, the Tata scion decided to send three of the runners at his own ex­pense to the Antwerp Games of 1920 as a historic first for India.

This was the birth of India’s Olympic encounter and national­ist sentiment was at its core. As Dorabji Tata described his motives in a personal letter to the IOC president, Count Baillet Latour, in 1929, “I therefore offered to arrange for the sending of three of the best runners to Antwerp to run the Olympic Marathon at the next meeting, when I hoped that with proper training and food under English trainers and coaches they might do credit to India. This proposal fired the ambition of the nationalist element in that city to try and send a complete Olympic team.”

But the peasant athletes had little or no idea of what was required to participate in the Olympics nor of the standard of performance essential to qualify for any of the events. For instance, a key member of the Gymkhana, when asked what time he thought was standard for a 100-yard race replied that it could be anything “from half a minute to a minute”. He was “astounded” when told that it was not a matter of minutes but rather of tenths of seconds. Despite their naivety about the rules of modern sport, Deccan Gymkhana members were all fired by a strong nationalist imagination to send a team to the Olympics and started raising subscriptions to finance a team to Antwerp and set up an Indian Olympic Association. Despite the enthusiasm of the organisers, public money at this early stage was not too forthcoming. This meant that India’s first tryst with international sport came to be financed largely by a combination of money from Tata, sundry princes, public collections and, interestingly, the Government of India. Apart from Tata’s own correspondence, a report published in the Statesman substantiates this point. The secretary of the Bombay branch of the proposed Indian Olympic Association sent the editor of the daily a letter appealing for support. The letter mentioned that a batch of six amateur athletes selected by a committee were soon to set sail for Antwerp by the steam­er Mantua under the supervision of AH Fyzee, India’s national tennis champion. The cost of the adventure was estimated at Rs 35,000 of which only Rs 18,000 had been collected so far. Of this, the Government of India contributed Rs 6,000, apart from helping to secure a passage for the touring party. The great cricketer, the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar, Ranji, was expected to represent the country at the Olympic Council in Belgium and he too had assured the team all possible assistance.

India’s hurriedly put-together Olympic contingent hardly created an impression at Antwerp and, by extension, in India. A good barometer of this is the fact that the Olympic Games barely merited a mention in Indian newspapers. If it did, it was only in the nature of one-line news briefs. Sample this one-line update, probably inserted by a sub-editor at Amrita Bazar Patri­ka published from Calcutta: “In catch-as-catch-can wrestling (featherweight) at the Olympic Games, Bernard (Britain) best Shimpe (British India) in 19 seconds.”

Little else is known about the men who represented India at Antwerp but one thing is certain: the Indian athletes did not do well and did not catch the nationalist imagination as their backers had hoped. As is clear, the six or seven athletes who travelled to Europe had little idea about modern sport. More­over, as Dorabji Tata recounts, there was plenty of discord among them, leading to a series of unpleasant incidents. Tata, who was not in good health, only visited Antwerp briefly to meet his colleagues at the IOC. On account of ailing health, he did not find time to witness the Games or meet the Indian contingent. India’s first appearance at the Olympics ended in sporting failure but the very fact that the athletes reached there was an achievement. At least, the journey had begun.

GETTING BETTER: PARIS 1924

Not overtly concerned with the failure at Antwerp, India once again entered a team at the Paris Games of 1924, and this time the nine-man contingent was better organised. If the contin­gent for the Antwerp Games was more the result of a locally driven initiative, spearheaded by Tata and his experiences at the Deccan Gymkhana, by this time a truly national effort had developed. The team for Antwerp had been selected largely by Tata after seeing some local runners in Poona. Now, for Paris, the Indian team was selected after rigorous screening of athletes at what was called an ‘Olympic Games’ in Delhi. These were the first ‘national’ congregation of Indian athletes in any organised form. In the words of AG Noehren, leader of the Chennai YMCA and secretary of the newly established Indian Olympic Association, the Delhi “‘Olympic Games’ were a unique contribution made to the country… and it is fair to state that these have been far more successful, have created a wider interest throughout the country and have produced more permanent results than any of us dared to hope for.”

By 1924, funding poured in from diverse regions across the country for the Olympics contingent. The subscription drive undertaken to finance the Games and the trips of the selected members to Paris was a success. A detailed breakdown of pub­lic funding for the Games shows the marked progress of the Olympic idea in the public mind by 1924. The Punjab Olym­pic Committee took the lead, contributing Rs 1,114, “which represented contributions made by Punjab school boys through 47 schools”. Punjab, in total, contribut­ed Rs 2,500. UP (United Provinces), Bihar, Orissa and Madras contrib­uted Rs 2,000 each while the Central Provinces contributed Rs 1,500. Calcutta, too, contributed Rs 4,000 towards the fund.

From the north to the west to the south, the Olympic ideal seemed to be catching the public imagination. Besides, as before, the princes were also approached and the Maha­raja of Patiala, the nation’s leading sports patron, contributed enough to fund the participation of the Patiala long jumper Dalip Singh. The Army too was sounded out to contribute to the passage of its representative and the government was called upon to put in a sum of Rs 5,000. That Olympic sports were gaining currency in India is evident from the manifold increase in press coverage between 1920 and 1924. Newspapers across the country carried news of multiple regional ‘Olympic Trials’ and the ‘Olympic Games’ at Delhi were reported thus, “The All India Olympic meeting to be held at the Roshanara Club, Delhi on February 8-9 promises to be a unique event in the history of sports in India. Reservations have already been booked for the Indian team, which will proceed to France on the steamer ‘Lancashire’ ex-Colombo on 29 May. The team will be accompanied by a professional coach who will continue to train the players on steamer deck and in France for a month before the Olympic begins.” The detailed programme of the meet and the timings of all the events fea­tured prominently in the dailies and provincial successes at the meet were greeted with considerable cheer in the regions.

The organised planning for the Indian participation at the Paris Games was driven by the formation of a permanent All India Olympic Association. Sir Dorabji Tata was invited to assume the presidency of the new body but it did not survive for more than three years. In 1927, another body, the Indian Olympic Association (IOA), was formed and it continues to administer Indian sport till the present day. Once again, Dorabji Tata was the president and AG Noehren the secretary. It was the new IOA that led India’s preparations for the 1928 Olympiad in Amsterdam where India had its first taste of Olympic success.

Amsterdam Olympics 1928Dhyan ChandOlympic GamesParis 2024Paris Olympics 1924Sir Dorabji Tata